14 September 2015

Modern Chess Engines

There was more material in my most recent Video Friday post, How Stockfish Works, than perhaps meets the eye. The presentation that ran in the background ('Modern Chess Engines' by Daylen Yan with support from Tord Romstad; cover page shown here) is available in entirety at Big Techday 8 - How do modern chess engines work?, from which I extracted a sequential list of topics from the titles of the slides.

Around 28 minutes into the video is a slide titled 'Recap' that lists eight high-level topics:-

Minimax
Negamax
Evaluation functions
Alpha-beta pruning
Transposition tables
Quiescence search
Search selectivity
Bitboards

While some of these topics have been known since the early days of chess programming -- esp. minimax and alpha-beta -- others are less familiar and have subordinate topics that deserve a separate look. I'll cover them in a series of posts that might bring me closer to the elusive goal: Overcoming the Operators.

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